Joan Didion

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Photo of Joan Didion by Robert Birnbaum

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American writer, known as a journalist, essayist, and novelist. Didion contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books. With her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she collaborated on several screenplays. She lives in New York City.

Didion was born in Sacramento, California and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956 with a BA in English. Much of Didion's writing draws from her life in California, particularly during the 1960s as the world in which she grew up "began to seem remote." Her portrayals of conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs, and sociopaths are now considered part of the canon of American literature.^{[citation needed]}

She adopted a culturally conservative stance; her early career being spent as a Goldwater conservative and writing incisive articles in William Buckley's National Review. Didion was infuriated that Ronald Reagan highjacked the 1964 Republican Convention. Perhaps as a reaction to Reagan who she termed a faux conservative, or as a result of being closely aligned with progressive writers in the New York literary world in which she moved in the seventies, she abandoned her earlier leanings and moved toward the liberal tenets of the Democrats. Didion retains a curious conservative bent, though, sharply chronicling America after World War II with its endless search for privacy and fullfilment of individual dreams.

Didion is the author of five novels and eight books of nonfiction. Her early collections of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) -- a book described in one review as helping to define California as "the paranoia capital of the world" -- made her famous as an observer of American politics and culture with a distinctive style of reporting that mixed personal reflection and social analysis. This led her to be associated with members of the New Journalism such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, though Didion's ties to that movement have never been considered particularly strong.

In 2001 Didion published Political Fictions, a collection of essays which had first appeared in the New York Review of Books. Issues and personalities covered in the essays included The Religious Right, Newt Gingrich, and the Reagan administration.

Where I Was From (2003), a memoir, explores the mythologies of California, and the author's relationship to her birthplace and to her mother. Indirectly, it also serves as a rumination on the American frontier myth and the culture that we see today in California as a direct consequence of a population of survivalists who made it "through the Sierra," finally posing the question "at what cost progress?"

Didion's latest book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was published October 4, 2005. The book-length essay chronicles the year following her husband's death, during which Didion's daughter, Quintana, was also gravely ill. The book is both a vivid personal account of losing a partner after 40 years of professional collaboration and marriage, and a broader attempt to describe the mechanism that governs grief and mourning. In November 2005, it won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Although Quintana seemed to be getting better during the period the book covers, she died of complications from acute pancreatitis on August 26, 2005, in New York City at age 39 after an extended period of illness. The New York Times reported that Didion would not change the book to reflect her daughter's death. "It's finished," she said.